What are Human Practices?
Human practices are an essential part of an iGEM project. As synthetic biology can bring innovative approaches to answer certain major problems in society (pollution, health and food issues mainly), it can also raise many questions. Our objective is to fully integrate people in the design of our project.
How does our project affect the world and how does the world affect our project? We will try to answer this question through two main actions: The educative actions and the public engagement actions.
Educative actions
Our educative actions aim to popularize synthetic biology and the iGEM competition to the larger public. This new science can bringup many suspicions and questions. This is why it is our duty to explain to the public how it works and its crucial use in research and everyday life.
In order to do that and in this time of health crisis (Covid 19), we plan to popularize synthetic biology thanks to videoconferences and mainly in schools. This will allow us to teach the students the biological aspect behind synthetic biology and to show that safety and ethics are preserved thanks to a rigorous use of science.
In the context of our project, it is important to raise awareness among the society about multiple drug resistant bacteria. This is currently a major healthcare concern and will only get worse in the following years. In fact, if a viable solution isn’t found, WHO estimated that 10 million people could die per year by 2050.
Public engagement
To fully integrate the Human Practices aspect in our project, we must do two things: raise social awareness on our project and most importantly, take into account what society has to say on it in order to adapt our project.
We will discuss with different stakeholders who are linked to our project. For example, talking about the scientific approach with scientists specialized in antibiotic resistant bacteria. We are also planning on talking about antibiotic resistance in animals with veterinarians and breeders or even pollution liked to antibiotic and bacteria usage with specialists in that field.
